The 1983 Visit of Pope John Paul II to Nicaragua

By Katherine Hoyt, March 1983

With all the misinformation being published right now about Pope John
Paul II's previous visit to Nicaragua in March of 1983, I decided that
I would make available a letter I wrote to my parents a few days after
that visit. By the time of this letter, I had been living in
Nicaragua for 15 years, most of that time in Matagalpa. As a
Catholic, I felt that the opportunity to attend a Mass celebrated by
the Pope was a very momentous one. It was momentous, but not in the
way I expected. Now, 13 years later, following the lead of the
Sandinistas, I had not wanted to rake up bad old memories. But since
others are doing so and twisting the facts as I remember them, I felt
moved to answer.

Well, I promised to write about the Pope's visit and so I guess I
must even though I would rather not even think about it much less
write about it! I feel that the visit to Central America as a whole
has meant a return to a pre-1967 Church: before Paul VI's encyclical
"Popularum Progressio"--which specified the cases in which
insurrection and rebellion would be justified--and the 1968 Latin
American Bishops Conference at Medellin, Colombia, which gave the big
push to liberation theology.

On this recent visit John Paul II spoke in words easily understood
by the Right as support for its cause: You peasants live in unjust and
inhuman conditions but don't be tempted to rise up in arms against
your oppressors; and Archbishop Romero was a martyr but we must not
allow his memory to be manipulated politically, etc., etc. But this
I'm sure you know. What you'd like to know is our experience of his
visit here.

Well, the government and the Church working together made a
tremendous effort to mobilize all means of transportation available in
the country so that 800,000 people, approximately 36% of the total
population, saw the Pope, either in Leon or in Managua. (Older
people, children under 12 and pregnant women were asked not to brave
the heat.) Everyone who wanted to go had the chance.

Victoria [my 13 year old daughter] and I went on the bus to Managua
two days ahead. We saw on television his arrival at the airport with
Daniel Ortega's very appropriate (but, I hear, badly received by the
U.S. press) quotation from a 1921 letter from Bishop Pereira of Leon
to U.S. Cardinal Simpson protesting U.S. intervention in his country.
The Pope was even then quite cool and we could see that he lectured
Father Ernesto Cardenal, but his airport speech was pretty good. The
service in Leon went off quite well. The only objectionable thing
that he said in his homily was about the "strict right of believing
parents" to not see their children submitted in the schools to
"programs inspired in atheism," something that has never been
contemplated here.

Well, after watching all this on TV, we ate lunch, I put on my
sunscreen and we (Victoria and I) took off walking on the prescribed
route to the Plaza [19 of July]. It took us almost an hour, from 1:40
to 2:30, to get there. (Access to the Plaza was completely open, by
the way.) First we got behind some people who had brought ice chests
and stools so because they stood on the stools and blocked our view,
we moved over to the right among simpler folk. (It turned out that
that first group was composed of Archbishop Obando supporters--there
were maybe 40 or 50 thousand of them all together right up in front.)
Most of the crowd where we were was composed of simple Christian
revolutionaries, women of AMNLAE [the women's association], peasants
of the ATC [farmworkers association] who had had their hopes falsely
raised by all sides, church and state, that the Pope was going to say
some words of consolation to the families which daily lose loved ones
to the counterrevolution, especially since just the day before 17
outstanding members of the Sandinista Youth Organization, killed in
an ambush, had been buried after a memorial program in this very same
plaza. Certainly if the head of a foreign state visits a country the
day after a busload of teen-agers killed in an accident have been
buried, he is expected to make SOME sympathetic remarks. However, the
Pope studiously avoided making ANY sympathetic words either publicly
or privately to the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs who gave him their
petition for peace. He could have said a few words of sympathy and
won over that crowd easily and satisfied the Sandinista leaders who
weren't expecting more than a crumb. Then it wouldn't have mattered
how strongly he spoke about Church unity under the bishops. Both
sides would have been both satisfied and disappointed. But he was
extremely careful not to give even a crumb to the revolution and I
think no one expected this unrelieved bleakness.

The Mass began at 5:00 and as the revolutionaries in the crowd began
to get the idea of the way things were going, they began to demand "A
prayer for our dead," "We want peace," and "We want a church on the
side of the poor."

When that terrible sermon (which demanded that we abandon our
"unacceptable ideological commitments" for the faith) was half over I
began to feel sick as a result of two and one half hours standing in
the sun in the crowd and extreme distress at the direction the Pope
was taking. Victoria insisted that we move back to a place where the
crowd was less dense and we could sit down and buy some water in
plastic bags. By this time the sun had gone down, the horizon was red
from so much dust raised on the outer edges of the Plaza, people were
chanting "people power, people power" now, too, along with "We want
peace," and the Pope was having a hard time moving along with the
Mass. At the silence between the consecration of the bread and that
of the wine, a women broke in with a megaphone to say (in respectful
tones, actually), "Holy Father, we beg you for a prayer for our loved
ones who have been murdered," or something very similar. The Lord's
Prayer somehow never got said and only a few people were given
communion (one was the mother of Daniel and Humberto Ortega who was
with the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs, having lost another son,
Camilo, in 1978). Finally at 8:00 p.m., the Pope gave the last
blessing and was off while the vast majority of the crowd stayed at
attention to hear the Sandinista Anthem.

Daniel Ortega's impromptu speech at the airport as the Pope left was
enough to make one cry. He almost begged the Pope to make one solid
proposal for peace in Nicaragua, to say one word, to give that one
crumb that he was not willing to give. We heard only part of it as we
were walking back to Toyita's house, dirty exhausted and I, of course
very distressed by the whole visit and certain we were headed for
schism. One of the last slogans somebody had cried out as the Mass
was ending was one of anguished defiance: "Because of Christ and His
Gospels, we are revolutionaries." That seemed to just about sum
things up.

While I showered, I turned the radio on to the BBC 9:00p.m. news.
The British announcer, in typical understatement, said that the Pope
had just finished saying the "most unusual Mass of his career in
Managua, Nicaragua."

Of course it was a boost for the counter-revolutionaries and we are
seeing an increase in the number of battles right now, some close to
Matagalpa--near San Ramon and San Dionisio--and all anybody talks
about is war. This has had serious repercussions in our Paulita who
has developed a terrible fear of war and what might happen to us all.
She starts crying when anyone talks about battles or civil defense
measures in school.